To Close Gaps, Schools Focus On Black Boys

By WINNIE HU; Griff Palmer contributed reporting.

Published: April 9, 2007

In an effort to ensure racial diversity, the school system here in northern Westchester County is set up in an unusual way, its six school buildings divided not by neighborhood but by grade level. So all of the second and third graders in the Ossining Union Free School District attend the Brookside School.

But some minority students, the black boys at Brookside, are set apart, in a way, by a special mentoring program that pairs them with black teachers for one-on-one guidance outside class, extra homework help, and cultural activities during the school day. ''All the black boys used to end up in the office, so we had to do something,'' said Lorraine Richardson, a second-grade teacher and mentor. ''We wanted to teach them to help each other'' instead of fight each other.

While many school districts have long worked to close the achievement gap between minority and white students, Ossining's programs aimed to get black male students to college are a new frontier.

Ossining school officials said they were not singling out black boys, but after a district analysis of high school students' grade-point averages revealed that black boys were performing far worse than any other group, they decided to act. In contrast, these officials said, the performance of black girls compared favorably with other students and did not warrant the same concern.

The district calls it a ''moral imperative,'' and administrators and teachers say their top priority is improving the academic performance of black male students, who account for less than 10 percent of the district's 4,200 students but disproportionately and consistently rank at the bottom in grades and test scores. The programs are voluntary, school officials said, and some students choose not to take part.

The special efforts for Ossining's black male students began in 2005 with a college-preparatory program for high schoolers and, starting last month, now stretch all the way to kindergarten, with 5-year-olds going on field trips to the American Museum of Natural History and Knicks and Mets games to practice counting.

Ossining's unusual programs for black boys have drawn the attention of educators across the country as school districts in diversifying suburbs are coming under new pressure to address what many see as a seemingly intractable racial divide with no obvious solution.

The federal No Child Left Behind law's requirement that test scores be analyzed for each racial group has over the past decade spotlighted the achievement gap even in predominantly white suburban districts.

Some of the nation's leading minority scholars have praised Ossining's approach, but other educators, parents and civil rights groups contend that such separate programs do more harm than good. Last year, the New York Civil Rights Coalition filed a complaint with the United States Department of Education over such a program at the City University of New York, and the group plans to file a complaint with the state against Ossining's program.

''I think this is a form of racial profiling in the public school system,'' said the coalition's executive director, Michael Meyers. ''What they're doing here, under the guise of helping more boys, is they're singling them out and making them feel inferior or different simply because of their race and gender.''

At a time of wider debate over the socioeconomic barriers facing black boys, the focus on boosting educational support has gained traction with policymakers. In Maryland, a state education task force asserted in December that ''school, itself, is an at-risk environment for African-American male youth'' and issued a 58-page report ''to justify fixing it -- whatever the cost.''

In New York and other large cities, such concerns have spurred the creation of all-male schools aimed at drawing black students. Now, with debate over the achievement gap spreading beyond city borders, efforts like Ossining's -- though few as comprehensive -- are sprouting up in suburbs nationwide.

In Teaneck, N.J., school officials formed an after-school club for black boys in 2005, with local black businessmen serving as role models. In the Cleveland suburbs, the South Euclid-Lyndhurst district has spent more than $20,000 a year on clubs that reward black male students for good grades with sleepovers and guest speakers.

And in the neighboring community of Shaker Heights, one of the nation's best-known honors programs for black male students, the Minority Achievement Committee Scholars, has since 2004 received calls from more than 40 school districts that want to copy its efforts.

Here in Ossining, where Sing Sing state prison looms as a reminder that more black men are behind bars than enrolled in college, Latoya Morris, who is black, said that most of her black male classmates dropped out of school before she graduated in 1999. Now the mother of a 5-year-old boy in kindergarten, Ms. Morris, a nurse, said the extra support for black boys makes sense because the statistics are stacked against them.

''I don't want my son to be in jail when he becomes a teenager,'' she said. ''I want him to have the same chances as a white child.''